I'm hoping that Samsung, HTC, Motorola and others take some time to analyze what apple did with the iphone in terms of battery life because it seems truly amazing.

This excerpt from Engadget's review of the iPhone:

"The biggest upshot we found on the media playback, though, was the iPhone's Herculean battery life. We've seen other reviews' media playback results vary, but ours seemed to jump far ahead of even Apple's lofty expectations.

Playing relatively high bitrate VGA H.264 videos, our iPhone lasted almost exactly 9 freaking hours of continuous playback with cell and WiFi on (but Bluetooth off). Yeah, we had to pick our jaws up off the floor, too. So by our tests, you could watch a two hour movie and drain off a little more than 22% of the battery -- totally acceptable for trip-taking and the like.

Our music testing showed similarly outstanding results. Playing back 160-192Kbps MP3s, our iPhone pushed about 29 hours and 30 minutes music playback. To put that in perspective, the Apple claims the iPod nano gets about 24 hours playback on a full charge, and the iPod a scant 14 - 20 hours.

To do a little simple math, you could watch two hours of video, listen to 8 straight hours of music, and still have only drained off less than half your device's capacity -- that is, if your iPhone's battery works as well as ours. (Read: your battery life may differ.) Still, if that's a good estimate of what users can expect from their device's power drain, you should have little issue making the iPhone your music and video player, in addition to your cellphone."

So the technology is here! From what I understand the iPhone is using a plain ol' lithium ion battery like the rest of us, but they've somehow managed to coax that kind of battery life with ultra low voltage processors and whatnot, other manufacturers need to take notice and implement similar improvements please!